breathing's just a rhythm
by BookkeeperThe
Summary: Here's the thing about pain that doesn't go away: you don't stop feeling it. You just stop mentioning it. [post-s8]


**Notes: title comes from the song 'One More Time With Feeling' by Regina Spektor. Doctor Who dialogue comes from towards the end of 3.09, **_**The Family of Blood**_**. **

**Warnings: chronic pain, implications of suicidal ideation, mentions of injury and illness, and touches on basically every disturbing theme which comes up in the show, including addiction and the death of children. **

**.**

The headaches never really go away.

They ease for a while, enough for him to convince Morgan that they're gone for good, but they return full-force after Maeve. He has a vague hypothesis that they have something to do with stress; hormonal imbalances or muscular tension or migraines caused by fluctuating blood-pressure. He gives up on getting a real diagnosis, acquires a prescription for painkillers – nonnarcotic, of course; just enough to take the edge off – and pushes on.

It's what he's been doing all his life.

.

Sometimes Spencer wants to be normal, just for a few days. Not because of the teasing and the awkwardness and the exhaustion that comes with being . . . well, him, but so that he'd have a baseline, something to compare against.

He wants to know if anyone else feels like nothing ever heals.

He knows (_god he __**knows**_) that there a wounds so deep and so devastating that the scars last forever. He sees them every day; Morgan's anger and Prentiss' compartments and Hotch's distance and each festering hole of atrophying flesh in the people they catch. They're terrible and painful and _visible_, and he knows (though he doesn't always believe) that no one is expected to be whole.

But when Spencer was fifteen he broke his little toe and he splinted it carefully and kept it elevated when possible and treated it tenderly for the prescribed eight weeks and it still twinges when he's cold or tired. When he was eleven a high school bully shoved his face into his lunch tray and he still can't smell chocolate pudding without wanting to throw up. He feels his mother's slow decline in every Bob Dylan song, his brief and uneventful bout of teenage pneumonia in every cold. He feels worn and frayed and sloppily repaired, body and mind a jumble of thin fabrics held together by the tenuous string of vague affection and hard-earned pain tolerance.

Most days he's pretty sure most people don't feel like this.

On the bad days, he's terrified that they do.

What if he's just weak?

.

He's alone when it sneaks into his thoughts.

He's wrapped in a throw blanket on top of his bed, lights off, TV on. BBC America is doing a Doctor Who marathon, playing an episode from series three which he's seen a dozen times over. It's been a long day. He's so, so tired. The idea slips past his defenses and springs, as a fully-formed sentence, into his mind.

Morgan would be a vengeance killer.

_Shut up,_ he tells his mind. _Shut up, shut up, shut up._

Familiar dialogue washes over him from the TV, but it doesn't help. He's seen the white rabbit, and he'll chase it down, down, down.

(_"Where's it gone?" "You tell me."_)

Multiverse Theory. In some universe, they are the predators, the killers, the lost and broken souls.

Rossi would be a narcissist, cutting down any who dared slight him. Prentiss would be an assassin, cold and clean and clinical. JJ – he doesn't know, can't picture it, doesn't want to. But Hotch and Morgan are so easy. Vengeance, pure and simple. Morgan would be personal and passionate, fists and fury and finally strangulation; Hotch would be a vigilante, aloof and organized, a single gunshot wound to the head. But they would both be wrong.

(_"But, in fairness, I will give you one word of advice. Run."_)

It's a thin, thin line between profiler and unsub, and Spencer fits too many profiles for comfort. But it wouldn't be vengeance. Hotch and Morgan, they don't understand. Carl Buford and George Foyet are not the controlling factors, not the independent variables. It wasn't Diane Turner or Tobias Hankel or Jason Gideon or Harper Hillman or even William Reid who hurt Spencer. It was all of them, and everyone who hurt them, and every indifferent line of genetic code which robbed his mother of her mind, and every random twist of fate which set all of them on their paths.

There's no escaping it. Not in this world. No saving the children.

Unless . . .

(_"He was being kind."_)

Spencer would be a mercy killer.

.

It's hot.

The Floridian sunlight is beating through the police station windows, air wavering above the blacktop outside, humidity weighing on everything like a shroud. It's hard to move, hard to breathe, impossible to think. There are five dead women in the morgue and Spencer keeps imagining them, laying there in the cold and the dark and the silence, and him, here, skin broiling and eyes burning and mind buzzing. He tries to tell himself he doesn't envy them.

Sweat drips down Spencer's nose, soaking into his hair, his clothes. Across from him, Morgan swipes droplets off his scalp with a grimace of disgust. The lights flicker.

A thought oozes sluggishly into Spencer's head.

"Power," he says.

Morgan stares at him.

"Yeah, man," he replies slowly. "I know it's about power."

"No." Spencer shakes his head. His hair drips against his neck. "Electricity. The bodies had been frozen. Where's he getting the power?"

Understanding dawns, and a second later Morgan is on his feet, pulling out his cell.

"Hotch!" he calls, stepping over to the door. And then, in a very different voice as he lifts the phone to his ear, "Baby girl! Can you pull up the electrical records for . . ." His voice fades as the door swings shut behind him, and Spencer leans back with a sigh of mingled relief and exhaustion. Hopefully this will be the break they need.

He rolls ups his sleeves, nose wrinkling at their dampness.

"Good job, Reid," says Morgan, clattering back into the room and grabbing the map they had been working on in vain. "Garcia's working her magic; we should have an address in no . . ." He trails off, eyes falling on Spencer's bare forearms.

Spencer glances down. His arms are just . . . his arms. Thin. Pale; not the angelic ivory of romance novels and love poems but just the sickly off-white of anemia and vitamin D deficiency. Smooth.

Oh. That's what Morgan is staring at. No track marks. Spencer looks up at Morgan's furrowed brow and can almost see the questions behind it. _If not his arms, then where? His legs, between his toes? Into his eyes, to avoid visible marks altogether?_

Morgan pulls his gaze away, clears his throat. Spencer finds he doesn't even have the energy to be annoyed. It's too damn hot.

"I don't scar," Spencer says, and it's the truth. The track marks were gone before he was a month sober. No mark from shrapnel or fists or falls lasts more than a week. Even his knee, shattered by a bullet and sliced open in surgery after surgery, nearly looks normal again. Whatever cracks and shifts beneath it, his skin is a perfect silk case. His statement is anything but false.

It tastes like the foulest lie he's even told.


End file.
